Lily sharing "Where the Wild Things Are" as part of NEA's Read Across America
James was not confused. He was mad. At me.
“We’re not lucky!” he pouted. “We live in a homeless shelter don’tcha know!”
Second graders are old enough to know where they live. They know they don’t have a house or an apartment like they used to. In my shelter school class there were anywhere from five to fifteen kids on any given day. These were the kids whose parents wouldn’t allow them to attend the “regular” school down the street, usually because someone was looking for them. An abusive spouse or a loan shark or a drug dealer.
And I had just called them lucky.
I had just said, “A lot of very nice people do some very nice things for our school. And now it’s time for us to do something for kids who aren’t as lucky as you are.”
I’m a teacher. I know what counts. And in the month of March, what counts – literally – is the Census.
If you work for a public school, college or university, and you’re tempted to surf away from this fabulous blog page on The Census since it doesn’t have anything to do with you, let me explain that there’s over $3 BILLION DOLLARS in EDUCATION FUNDING at stake, depending on how The Census in your community plays out.
If you’re reading this, and you’ve got students – preschool to graduate school – you’ve got a stake in the Census.
I reminded her that he gave us a down-payment on his promise to make education a priority by not only including jobs protection in the first stimulus package a year ago, but actually earmarking some of those jobs fund to protect school jobs - 300,000 teachers, school secretaries and custodians didn’t get pink slips because of those federal dollars that went right to schools.
Nostalgia is a powerful and often faulty lens. It can distort and makes the view seem at times softer and at times harsher than, in fact, it ever was.
I’ve been indulging myself in nostalgia these days as it occurs to me that my first 4th graders turn forty this year. Coincidentally, I turn thirty-nine. Go figure.
I have all their pictures hanging on the wall. They are gorgeous ten-year olds and it is quite impossible that they have pot bellies and graying temples and children in college. They will always be ten.
